People have been banging on ad nauseam about the "culture of victimhood" that supposedly pervades western society, but it hasn't done any good, for more people than ever feel they are victims. Tony Blair, with his "inner confidence", feels a victim of those who find fault with his warmongering and has had to have a holiday in the West Indies to recover. Bill Clinton felt a victim of his lust for Monica Lewinsky and sought religious counselling to cure him of it. Practically everyone feels a victim of something or other.

Wives who are offered less than tens of millions of pounds in divorce settlements from their very rich husbands feel they are being victimised, as do the husbands who are ordered to give it to them. Heather Mills will doubtless feel very sorry for herself if she gets less than £200m from Sir Paul McCartney.

The guiding principle for most people is that nothing is their fault and that anything that goes wrong with their lives is either a disease or has been cruelly inflicted on them by somebody else. I know this, yet I am still capable of being surprised.

I was surprised when listening to Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show to hear a caller proudly say he had no intention of repaying the £30,000 he owed to banks and credit card companies. This was because a) banks made too much money, and b) they believed too much of what you told them when you lied to them in order to get them to lend you some. Since banks were both excessively rich and excessively foolish, it was right you should try "to get money back off them". A more scrupulous caller to the programme, one also owing £30,000, did feel he ought to repay his debts and said he had already suffered penury in his efforts to do so; but he nevertheless felt a victim of those who owned luxuries - iPods, computers, books, and so on - that he was unable to afford.

But it's Mel Gibson who takes the cake. This crazy, rightwing Catholic, who makes the Pope look like a heretic, released a torrent of anti-semitic abuse when arrested by Californian police for drunken driving. He seems to have tried to divert their attention from the open bottle of tequila in his car by shouting about "fucking Jews" and accusing Jews of being "responsible for all the wars in the world".

In a statement later, he said he was not an anti-semite, but that he wanted to "meet with leaders of the Jewish community ... to discern the appropriate path for healing". "I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery," he said.

Healing of what? Recovery from what? The thing of which Gibson feels he is a victim is very difficult to identify. It is not anti-semitism, for he has said he is not anti-semitic. But it can't be love of alcohol either, for why should he turn to Jewish leaders to cure him of that? I can only assume that it's his twisted Catholicism of which he is a victim, for Jewish leaders could certainly try to help him with that.